And behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem

about three score furlongs. And it came to pass that while they communed together and reasoned,

Jesus himself drew near and went with them.

Hey listeners, this is Nick from Scripture Central, and today's podcast addresses the question,

Why did Christ appear to two disciples on the road to Emmaus?

Shortly after Jesus' resurrection, still relatively few had seen the risen Lord, or heard the

news that he was indeed risen from the grave.

The first witnesses to the resurrection were women who went to the tomb early in the morning,

and they, when they returned from the sepulchre, they told all these things unto the eleven

and to all the rest.

Among these disciples who were with the remaining eleven apostles, two of them went that same day to a village called Emaeus.

As they traveled, they talked together of all these things which had happened,

and communed together and reasoned about what they had both seen in the past few days

and what they had heard from the women earlier that day.

As Kent Brown observes,

the point of discussion between the two disciples, of course, has to do with the empty tomb,

the fact of which they and the others cannot fathom. Furthermore, the verb translated as reasoned,

carries a dual meaning of to discuss and to dispute or debate. As such,

while the two disciples were traveling to Amas, it is possible that their discussion entailed lively debates regarding how to make sense of the persistent report from the women and Jesus'

unforeseen death. It was during this time that Jesus himself drew near and went with

them. Beginning with this statement, Luke begins to emphasize the reality of Jesus' resurrection

through the deliberate use of witnesses to Jesus' physical presence. Using an emphatic pronoun

...